Well now that's a loaded question.
I have a pretty good relationship with my Dad. He and I don't always see eye to eye but he is content to let me be me and make the mistakes that I have to make to grow. He always tries to be encouraging and supportive in the best way that he knows how. But he and I were not always this way. He traveled a lot as a truck driver until I was 10. I didn't have a very good relationship until then and I probably only do now because he had a serious heart attack and died on the table for almost a minute. I think that was God's way of telling him to slow down. Enjoy what you have here in Memphis and stop being everywhere else except for where you need to be. Ever since his heart attack we have grown together so well and he has a relationship with my older sister and her two boys that would never have been imaginable before.
My mother, however, is a different story. She's had to do a lot of tough things in her life: watch her father die slowly of lung cancer, watch her mother die even slower of Alzheimer's, have her brother and sisters turn on her after my grandmother's death and demand the things that she had left to us since we had taken care of her for 5 years. She hasn't handled a lot of this very well. She holds on to me too tightly and on some level I can understand that. But on others, it's too much. I grew up with an overwhelming pressure to be perfect. I had to have great grades, be involved in all sorts of extra curricular activities, have a ton of friends, etc etc. My mother did not have all of these things growing up. She wasn't particularly good in subjects that I excelled in. She was introverted and didn't make friends easily. Therefore, I feel like a good part of my childhood was my mother living through me. Wanting to do the things that she wasn't able to as a child. Once my grandmother died, it almost seemed like my mother wanted me to suddenly take care of her. Problem was, I was 14 years old. I couldn't take care of myself, much less her. And our relationship has been strained ever since. She and I fight all the time because I don't want to do things the way she wants me to or I don't agree with her on everything, etc etc....and I hate it. I hate it so much. I wish that I could have the mother-daughter relationship that you see on Gilmore Girls, but in reality, I have the grandmother-mother relationship. And it sucks. We didn't talk for 5 weeks this winter (ending with Christmas Day...how fitting) because she wanted me to drop everything on the one day that Jacob and I had to run a ton of errands and drive her around. I said no. We had important things that we needed to get done. Then nothing....for five weeks.
Because of this, I have a weird relationship with Jacob's mom whom I love dearly. She's asked me to call her "mom"....I told her that I don't know if I could. Mom is such a loaded word to me now, after everything, that it feels weird to have something else associated with it like that. So for the time being, I call her 'Ms. Lynn' like I have for the past five years....maybe one day.
And now, unrelated: I am officially obsessed with this song...and lord knows I need to hear this pretty much every day.
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